Game first, toy second? You know, I don’t think that refers to video games but rather to board games. They own and distribute a ton of them. I don’t always think of Hasbro as a toy company, courtesy of them acquiring Parker Brothers (i.e. Monopoly) long ago alongside Wizards of the Coast. I think of Hasbro in the mold of a multi-faceted conglomerate who happens to have gotten its initial fortune by selling toys. Since it doesn’t need to lean against that, it happily switched gears.

Not quite, though: there are countless collectible pop culture-inspired Monopoly boards. It’s neither games nor toys–it’s collectibles and nostalgia. That’s the only real hardware they’re selling these days.

I’m going to be quite honest: I just don’t get the hatred towards Hasbro. Sure, they’re just another one of those corporations that thought it could escape scot-free after entertaining the get-woke brigade, but only a handful of those are actually nauseating, not just reviled by disaffected buyers. Going woke is just symptomatic of difficult fiscal years, not political sympathizing, and those inclined to disagree or read more to it than that are technically barking up a correct tree out of thousands or millions more that constitute a far harder target to saw down.

Yet, look what we’re all doing, here. Yeah, whatever! All I know is that they’re trying to level costs when that can be achieved simply by making editions of Dungeons & Dragons in regular book print, not glossy colored finish with innumerable digital-painted images borne from A.I. generation. It’s a legal document, not a pin-up. Decent pencil ink images–black and white, no grayscale–that employ negative space for an otherworldly pulp aesthetic and then, suddenly, they got sleek editions that actually resemble old manuscripts without breaking the bank.

I don’t like their general creative direction and plenty of others feel likewise, so I can understand their business direction: lacuna coil. However, without there being an actual liquidation of assets or multiple consecutive filings of chapter eleven, I’m not buying that they’re dead and gone. Hasbro’s corporate HQ is very close to where I live–a little drive across state lines and presto, there they are–and all housed in this lengthy brick building. Funny to think that a place of that size could have engendered so much controversy.

Yet, they’re still around and have been around for a long time from brand recognition alone. A few upstarts who are hounding us all over unreachable equity while tussled inside a publicly traded corporation have not been able to land a sneak attack, 50+ damage, critical hit, or even an attack of opportunity on Hasbro, because Hasbro has enough goodwill and thoughts and prayers even after burning countless bridges that it weathers the outspoken kiddy-corner of a constipated few netizens without physical ties to one another beyond the hatred of an ironic monolith of corporate sustainability.

That’s right, I’ll say it: people are not driven to arson and murder at the mention of Hasbro’s name. The public is not fixated on the destruction of a company seemingly on the brink of self-destruction because the public is still eating and drinking and, even if not, it was never a personal issue at the very same time. Whereas most of the dice-rollers among us have made it the latter, nobody among them is of the former unless they double as a hole-in-the-wall collectible vendor looking for something better to sell than Jon Kent sexting a twinkle-toed terrorist.

Businessmen rarely make it personal, or at least not reactively so–anything they don’t sell is an obvious safety hazard–but extreme cases of lead poisoning, caps, and choking hazards are better attributed to foreign and domestic sweatshops that do need running aground so they’ll never get a hip deal with any company period, and I prefer to burn down every single one of them well in advance of some lined-up bricks near where Gothix does her podcast! I just don’t get hating on Hasbro.

“They own Wizards of the Coast!”

Neat.

So did everybody else, even Wizards, who have owned themselves plenty of times, but not even Wizards ever stopped to wallow in self-hatred over it.